James Watkins

“There's nothing worse in television than what I call 'poor man's Jerry Bruckheimer.'”

“I do love a dark movie.”

“Directing is an act of interpretation.”

“A lot of the best stories are now being told on television.”

“The opportunity to be able to tell long-form character stories is something that TV affords and is therefore a terrain that a lot of filmmakers are interested in exploring.”

“It helps for actors if you have one director.”

“Living in London, you feel the sense of how it has developed into a service city. People come here from around the world - both to launder their money and launder their reputations.”

“As a screenwriter, you always have frustrations. It's just the nature of the job, and you have to live with it. Your vision is not going to be the same as the director's vision. It doesn't mean one is better or worse; it means they're different.”

“If you look at 'The Sopranos,' there's this notion of a criminal element on its last legs.”

“Filming in India was very special. The chaos, the noise, and the sensory overload was all really wonderful. It was a new world to me, and being able to capture that was incredible.”

“I think audiences are far too sophisticated now to have an English actor putting on a Russian accent - it feels fake.”

“Television is ever more ambitious, more akin to the Victorian novel with multiple narratives and more discursive material.”

“For action to work, you need an awful lot of coverage. Because if you do a fight sequence, you really need to be able to creed the energy in the edit or augment the energy in the edit. So you need to really, really cover it.”

“The first series of 'McMafia' is very Alex Godman-centric and could continue to be, but we haven't even begun to explore the Middle East or Africa or even South America in detail. One of our ambitions would be to drop into some of these other places and, by doing so, bring the audience into a world that they wouldn't necessarily have been in.”

“Parents fear for their children. Absolutely, I think it's a deep and troubling theme to explore.”

“Chemistry's a weird thing. You can see actors who are friends in real life but have no screen chemistry. Then there are actors who don't get on but have great chemistry.”

“As a screenwriter, you are so used to things going in directions that you wouldn't have taken, so to be able to say, 'This is how I intended it, this is how I want to shoot it, and these are the decisions that I'll live by,' I think directing is a logical conclusion of mine.”

“If you think about the traditional mafia stories we grew up on, it is always about the death of criminal organisations - things like the 'Sopranos' - the last vestiges of once proud families subsumed by the modern era.”

“I just think action films now have... often, because you can do anything with CGI, people do. And I don't think you necessarily should. You lose that sort of human dimension, and you get all the stuff breaking the laws of physics.”

“I don't really watch a load of 'Game Of Thrones.'”